A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton spent 27 years monitoring East Asian economics from a base in Tokyo. In September 1987 he issued the first of several predictions of the Tokyo banking crash and went on in "Blindside," a controversial 1995 analysis that was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith and Bill Clinton, to show that a heedless America was fast losing its formerly vaunted leadership in advanced manufacturing -- and particularly in so-called producers' goods -- to Japan.
His 1999 book "In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity" anticipated the American Internet stock crash of 2000 and offered an early warning about the abuse of new financial instruments.
In his 2008 book "In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony," he challenged the conventional view that China is converging to Western economic and political values.
His books have been translated into French, Russian, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. They have been read into the U.S. Senate record and named among the ten best business books of the year by Business Week and Amazon.com.

Horsemeat Dinners, Shameless Banksters, and the Future of the Human Condition

The horsemeat discovered on British dinner tables last week was (1) supplied by a Swedish frozen foods marketer that had (2) outsourced meal preparation to a French company that (3) operates a factory in Luxembourg that (4) uses meat imported, (5) via a Dutch agent, (6) from Romania. At least that is the BBC’s version of the byzantine sequence (other versions differ in minor details). What is clear is that the affair has thrown another tanker-load of gasoline on the British people’s already incandescent rage at the European Union (EU) and its role in undermining their sovereignty.

Although the American press has been slow to sense the historic significance of recent events in the UK, British exasperation with the EU has the potential to shake the latter-day world order. A symptom of the strains is that the UK’s pro-EU Prime Minister, David Cameron, has felt obliged to promise the British electorate a straight in-out referendum on British membership of the EU. Cameron probably doesn’t realize it yet but he may just have touched off a geopolitical avalanche.

Certainly his referendum is a destabilizing – if in my view highly welcome – move at a time when the world economic order has rarely seemed more precarious. That order is founded on an overtly anti-democratic commitment to globalism on the part of the foreign policy elites of the UK and United States. Yet globalism is not working and the evidence of its failure mounts daily. The UK’s horsemeat woes aside, the United States has plenty of reasons to wonder about globalism’s impact on the American way of life. Just in the last few weeks alone the American public has awakened to the reality that:

(1) Boeing, a company that subsumes within it virtually all the once-independent corporations that put a man on the moon in 1969, has become disastrously hollowed out, and

(2) the New York Times’s computer system has been repeatedly hacked by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

As history has repeatedly shown, the course of international politics is a notable exemplar of chaos theory. Just as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in a Brazilian rain forest may trigger a hurricane in Texas, one embattled British politician’s narrowly partisan maneuvering – which is what Cameron’s referendum is all about – could quite possibly unleash transformative change around the world. Certainly this would not be the first time that large global consequences have flowed from narrowly-based initial developments. It was the intervention of a diminutive pistol-wielding Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, that set off World War I. For a more recent, if similarly calamitous, manifestation of the power of chaos theory, consider how different the world would be today had not a devout, soft-spoken Saudi Arabian engineer inherited a significant fortune from his estranged father. That engineer was Osama bin Laden and his inheritance, of course, bankrolled al Qaeda.

Like Gavrilo Princip’s pistol shot and bin Laden’s inheritance, Cameron’s referendum could have far-reaching consequences. The difference this time is that – at least in the view of those of us who have been suspicious of globalism all along – most of the consequences will be benign. The fact is that, in the face of East Asia’s relentless pursuit of one-way free trade, Washington’s vaunted strategy of “global leadership” amounts to borrowing from China to save the world from China. A British withdrawal from the EU – which would be the likely result of any honestly structured referendum – may well be just the shock therapy needed to jolt policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic into rejoining the reality-based community.

If the British referendum does trigger a rethink in the United States, it would not be the first time in the recent past that the mother country has led American opinion.

In the 1960s, for instance, it was the UK far more than the US that created that decade’s famous youth culture. (The Beatles were global superstars by 1963, two years before Allen Ginsberg invented flower power and six years before the boomers converged on Woodstock.)

In social policy too, the UK has tended to move earlier than the United States. In the busy parliamentary year of 1967, the British legalized both abortion and homosexual behavior, for instance. That was six years ahead of Roe vs Wade and more than three decades before remaining anti-gay laws in the United States were struck from the statute book.

In world affairs too, the British have often led: London established full diplomatic relations with Beijing as early as 1972, for instance – nearly seven years ahead of Washington. Similarly the British were earlier to embrace the fashion for financial and economic deregulation. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman had struck vigorous root among the British media and political establishment as early as 1976, and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in May 1979, eighteen months ahead of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory. (As late as 1978 incidentally pro-regulation Democrats had won a healthy majority in Congress.)

The irony is that Cameron is hardly central casting’s idea of a bomb-thrower. As for the parliamentarians who have forced his hand, they hail mainly from the right of his Conservative Party and see themselves as enthusiastic supporters of global free trade.

That said the wider cause of globalism is now thoroughly discredited in the UK. Not the least of its problems is its close association with the bankers of the City of London. At a time when countless ordinary Britons have been badly squeezed by economic austerity, the charlatans and outright crooks of the City have continued to award themselves outrageous pay packages.

Even Cameron does not conceal his disgust with some aspects of globalism, not least its role in undercutting the British tax base. Feelings have not been soothed by the release of a report documenting how major U.S. corporations minimize their British tax liabilities by channeling their British revenues through tax havens. Among corporations cited were such household names as Starbucks, Google, and Amazon, which despite doing huge business in the UK pay hardly any tax there. Some home-grown British corporations such as Vodafone and Barclays have also been pilloried. Much of the criticism moreover has come from media organizations like the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail that have traditionally been pro-business pillars of the Conservative establishment.

Top Conservatives generally hope the UK will remain in the EU. The problem is that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. While they believe in maintaining close trade links with the continent, few of them identify with Brussels’s increasingly insistent push for “ever closer union” – political and social union, that is. Thus Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and a former intelligence chief, cites the European justice agenda as a major source of friction. A key issue is the so-called European Arrest Warrant which renders the British government powerless to second-guess extradition requests from other EU nations. As a result, several British citizens have suffered scarifying legal misadventures in, among other places, Greece. “The problem is that the system is based on the fiction that police, courts and prisons are all equally good inside all EU countries,” says Neville-Jones. “That is patently not the case and the result is anomalies which, given UK political culture and the activities of constituency MPs, cannot be shoved under the carpet.”

Douglas Carswell, a Hayekian who counts as one of the Conservative Party’s most passionate Euroskeptics, cites the EU’s anti-democratic character as a principal bone of contention. “My American friends have no idea how anti-democratic the EU really is,” he says. “It has been calculated that between 70 percent and 80 percent of our laws are now coming from the EU bureaucracy. In American terms, it is as if federal agencies were able to make laws without reference to Congress or to the states.”

Unfortunately, as the prominent Labor Party Europhile Denis MacShane points out, any effort now by the UK to roll back the less welcome aspects of the European “project” comes a little late. “Cameron needs to persuade 26 other governments and parliaments that opening a major treaty revision to satisfy Britain is something to be desired,” he recently commented. “A new treaty would require a nightmarish ratification process involving referendums in countries like Denmark, France, and Ireland that would plunge Europe into years of inward-looking rows at a time when it still hasn’t emerged from the worst economic crisis in its history.”

Viewed purely in terms of British party politics, however, Cameron’s gambit is a Machiavellian masterstroke. In an inspired gimmick, he has promised that the referendum will be held only AFTER the Conservative Party is returned to power in a general election expected in 2015. As Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, has already ruled out a referendum, this leaves countless anti-EU Labor voters high and dry. Even the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a small anti-EU group, has been cunningly sidetracked. Drawing its support mainly from the right, UKIP had previously loomed as an ever larger threat to the Conservatives’ traditional base. Now the Conservatives can credibly allege that a UKIP vote will merely divide the Euroskeptics and let in the Labor Party (a majority of whose leaders are dyed-in-the-wool Europhiles). UKIP stalwarts like Godfrey Bloom, a member of the European Parliament, splutter that Cameron will in the end renege on a straight in-out vote. This might well be a correct reading of Cameron’s instincts but the pressures on Conservative leaders, not least from their own rank-and-file, to follow through with an honest referendum is now intense.

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Only the snobby Brits would complain about eating horse meat, while a large percent of the world are thinking, ‘ah, you have meat to eat’.

“In world affairs too, the British have often led”

That’s true they were also the first to force the Chinese to buy opium and then force a war onto them and take their land. Oh, and also first to try and take over India while stealing its resources. And.. Well, need I go on?

Jamo, its not so much the ingredients, its the lies and deceit that really gets us snobby Brits going. If you care about your health and happiness it would serve all of us to stick to a clean vegetarian based diet and if you are going to include meat make sure it is grass fed and organic before it hits your pan. Th US has the highest rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart problems and that is directly related to diet and lifestyle

@Jamo….Never really understood the snobby thing, but it probably says more about certain Americans than Brits. As for the anti Brit rant, you have managed to dredge back 200 years to come up with the Opium Wars and the occupation of Hong Kong (the New Territories were leased from China). Interesting to note that the Hong Kong Chinese are currently protesting in the streets about loss of democracy. While I’m sure they don’t want to return to British rule, they can’t be that illdisposed to the benevolent condition we left them in. And then India. When Churchill was dining with the Roosevelts a woman guest asked him about the poor Indians. He enquired of her if she meant those proud peoples who had prospered under British rule or the indiginous peoples of North America who had been betrayed, deported, herded in to reservations, cheated of their land, infected with disease and massacred as a matter of policy by successive Washington governments. Not very noble your side of the Atlantic. At least we’re not snobby about your shortcomings.

Tracey, many of those issues you called out are not borne of the problems you think they are. The core root of the problem is capitalism. If you go into any wealthy area, you will not find quik-cash payday loan shops, pawnshops, and fast food. However, if you go into any impoverished area, you will see nothing but these places. That’s because cheaply-made processed food is marketing toward the poor, while organic health foods are marketed at a high price that is often out of reach of the average “poor” family (and there are a lot of them in the US right now).

I’m not saying that personal responsibility has no place here, but it is a vicious cycle that you might find hard to understand unless you’d experienced it as I have. The system in the US is set up to keep the poor poor, keep the rich rich, and force the middle-class to become one or the other. The biggest part of the diet and lifestyle problem stems from the economic problems that are driving people into poverty, and leaving them with few food options that are not unhealthy. Poverty and shamelessly opportunistic capitalism are the root causes and much of the poverty is caused by corruption, immoral business practices, and greed, either directly or indirectly..

When I was poor a few years ago (now I’m a well paid IT professional) I did use Pawn shops, and I valued their service to the community. I would pawn my laptop, get some food and beer money, and then when I had some income I would go and buy it back. Everybody wins. I did this several times, it was a cycle, but it wasn’t vicious. Most people who remain poor their whole lives are just stupid, lazy and commit crimes, which then locks them into a vicious cycle…but capitalism didn’t do that, they did that. It’s not the Pawn shops fault they stole something, pawned it, and got arrested.

While the initial reaction to the horse mean scandal is “yuck, I don’t want to eat that” and “thats false advertising” a bigger issue is potentially diseased or drugged animals entering the food chain and posing a risk to peoples health.

Nice, whitewash history. I like how Osama supposedly funded all this mayhem himself. Truth is, yes he was rich, but he was well funded to the tune of over fifty billion dollars a year from the US and allies when he called his bunch the Mujaheddin. Even more curious, him and the eleven nine eleven hijackers came form a country that was our ally, yet was used as a jingoistic rally cry to invade other countries. Well done, NWO, either way the taxpayers will pay, and pay, and pay.

Commonly omitted from any discussion of “free trade” is the environmental damage caused by it. For example, most car parts that were formerly rebuilt and resold in the United States are now simply discarded, and a new part, shipped from China’s government owned manufacturing complex by petroleum fueled tanker 10,000 miles away, is sold to the consumer. The same can be said for most electronics, toys, clothes, tools, etc. It’s absolute insanity, but it is illustrative of how China’s authoritarian government owned steel, banking, mining, gas, oil, etc, distorts markets and hastens waste and environmental degradation worldwide.

This planet has been run on a greedy concepts of Capitalisms for a long while. Thanks to free flowing informations available on internet-most ordinary people are beginning to realise that ” something’s not right for a long while”. Like many others, I came upon this very world concerns that was being echoed by Jack Fresco in 1970′s. It really is coming down to all the concerns raised in documentaries such “ future by design”, now “venus project” and thrive movement documentary.Why can’t things be simple and run on common sense ? things like :

1) Every nation becoming self sufficient in producing its own food. Every technological and agricultural knowledges be shared amongst all nations.This should also happen in the areas of : clean energy, and water productions for human needs.

2) We can then move onto this monster called “Banks”. People should manage their own money- through their own banks in each nation.All the present major aspects of “banks, finance” has to be dismantled and aligned with new goals of serving humanity as a whole-on any part of this planet.

3) All signed treaties between each nation has to be reviewed and rewritten so that no nations are in any position to take advantage of any other nations-and this has been the major human problem-as the rich and so called developed nations have over the years manipulated treaties in their favour through financial systems of this world.

4) A nation should should only sell its excess food -if there’s a demand for it and a nation should only import food-if it really can’t grow its own. As far as technological side of things are concerned : productions of things like vehicles, technologies in various fields of human endeavours- it can be arranged in “exchange of resources” so the cost of these technologies isn’t burdening the importer nations.

5) People should be free to live on any nation for how ever long they choose as long as their background is scrutinised in terms of health, and any history of criminal past, present. As long as they live on that nation-he/she pays 50 percent tax-off the normal tax amount to that particular nation. And he/she can move onto next nation and same rules be applied.

These are some of the my thoughts regarding this larger view of ” if we as human species are going in the right directions on this planet ” ? It doesn’t matter how advanced and fancy any future gadgets any company puts out = if humans don’t get food, water (and shelter) for a week at best- most us would drop like flies.And because we as human species have priced food ,water, shelter-the very essential to survive comfortably as human species in the name of capitalism-then we are forever stuck in this vicious evil “ plot”. A simple thought would be ..what if every humans had affordable access to fresh water,food and decent shelter-and didn’t have to struggle daily due to availability of “abundance created through shared technologies from each nation”- then chances are, we as human species would be solving bigger challenging aspects of humanity and the universe. Human life indeed would be on its way to star trek ideals.

From a 2013 perspective, your ideas seem almost fanciful, but are certainly less fantastic than the notion that “free trade”, and free movement of capital can occur between China’s authoritarian state owned system and the U.S, without seriously threatening democracy. We seem to be moving more to the Chinese model, rather than the other way around.